Cruz slams Senate GOP 'squishes'

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Friday that his fellow GOP senators lambasted him and Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for threatening to filibuster gun control reform.

“They said, ‘Listen, before you did this the politics of this were great — the Dems were the bad guys, the Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes.’ Well, there is an alternative — you could just not be a bunch of squishes,” Cruz said Friday at a FreedomWorks event in Texas.

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Earlier in his remarks, Cruz said the recent gun control debate was one of the most contentious in recent history — or at least as long as the four months since he’s been in the Senate.

“I don’t know if there’s an issue that has generated more heat internally in the Republican conference. We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand and Mike and me and yelling at us at the top of their lungs — I mean really upset,” Cruz said.

He continued: “And they said, ‘Look, why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home my constituents are yelling at me that I’ve got to stand on principle.’ I’m really not making that up. I don’t even bother to argue with them. I just sort of let them yell and say, you know, ‘Vote your conscience.’”

Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) failed to have their bipartisan proposal that they said would have improved background checks on firearms pass the Senate.